Life with Bears

I know we all feel we have been living with bears for the past 12 months, but I am not referring to the stock market.

The wild bear population in New Hampshire crosses paths with humans now and then, as it does in upstate New York. On my family’s New Hampshire farm we often see evidence of the bears’ co-existence with us, along with an occasional glimpse. Sometimes we see a cub, sometimes an adolescent, other times very large adults. We clearly have multiple bears around us, but we tend to refer to them as “the bear.”

We may not see each other often, but we have a relationship. Every summer, we share the fruit from our raspberry patch: the bear comes at night, while we pick during the day. The bear delights in my father’s compost pile. I keep telling Dad to put the compost further from the house, but Dad and the bear have met on the trails and they respect each other.

A bear seen from the window of my cousin Penny's house in New Hampshire.

My cousin Penny is determined to feed the birds in spite of the bear’s enjoyment of bird seed. She stubbornly keeps replacing destroyed bird feeders. One spring, she spotted the bear removing her bird feeder and heading into the woods with it. Without thinking, she gave chase, shouting “Give that back!” As she got further into the woods in pursuit of the bear she suddenly stopped, and thought to herself: “What am I doing?” The bear kept the feeder.

On another occasion, Penny’s husband David spotted the bear just outside the door to their back porch. He got his camera and began taking pictures. After a few minutes of picture taking, he wondered why the bear didn’t leave.

“Get out of here, you ugly moth-eaten meshugga bear!” The bear did not respond to that or to further trash-talking.

Finally, David looked up in the tree next to the porch, and spotted a bear cub.

You never argue with an upset mother, so he gave up on the trash talking and backed off.

My brother Norman’s house had screen doors on opposite sides of the small cottage he bought on the edge of the farm. One year, the bear came charging in, right through the screen… then kept on going, right through the other screen and outside.

My brother has since remodeled the house, and the bear can’t repeat that feat, but he has managed many times to open the garage door to get at garbage stored there. It’s never fun to pick up a trail of trash leading into the woods.

When my husband Allan and I walk to and from my parents’ house at night (about a five minute brisk walk), we are aware that the bear could be nearby. A few years ago, walking back in the moonlight, we wondered why my brother had put a rock in the middle of his garden. Then the rock moved. We stopped moving. A small bear stretched, looked at us, and lazily ambled off, pausing just before entering the woods to do what bears are supposed to do in the woods.

We have to be actively aware of our potential for attracting bear attention in the summer, but all is quiet in the winter, when bears hibernate. The compost and garbage are safe, the bird feeders can be out, and our moonlight walks are peaceful and silent.

Still, in the winter, when we are out in the woods, we wonder where the bear is sleeping. Oddly, we miss him, and her, and them.

One Response

On one of my many canoe trips in northern Ontario our leader stewed prunes for breakfast and left the pot by the fire to cool overnight. We woke in the morning to the sound of someone banging on a frying pan, and when I got up I saw the bear standing behind a tree about 30 yards away. The tree was about nine inches in diameter. The bear thought it was hiding because its eyes were behind the tree, but it stuck out quite roundly on either side. It stayed there while we ate breakfast, took down the tents, and slid our canoes into the water to continue our paddle.

However on another occasion a friend was closing his cottage for the winter and had briefly left it before locking up. When he returned in the spring he found the inside of his cabin a shambles, with claw marks near a sliding window where the bear finally was able to let itself out.